A nasty, primitive ideology

Dalrymple writes that young Western middle-class Muslim plotters, of whom there are many,

are fully at home neither in the culture of their parents nor in that of the host country.

Youth

is the time when one looks outward for unifying explanations of one’s dissatisfactions, and education is in part the means by which abstractions become more real than the phenomena before one’s eyes. An extremely nasty and primitive ideology, in which a distant but perfect future appears to its adherents more real than anything in the present, lies ready to hand. According to this ideology, insensate cruelty is a sign not of bad character or sadism, but of commitment.

Young educated Muslims

think they have plenty of supposedly objective grounds for their resentment against the host society.

In the West, Muslims

do significantly worse educationally and economically than any other group. A larger proportion of Muslims leave school with no qualifications than any other minority. While young Hindus have a youth unemployment rate below the national average, Muslims have a rate much above it. Young male Muslims are filling British prisons, while there are very few Hindus or Sikhs in prison. In these circumstances, the young educated Muslims form an élite that, with the misplaced and arrogant idealism of youth, feels a responsibility to enlighten, lead, or liberate their less fortunate brethren, of whom there are many.

Many young Muslims reject communal self-examination

in favour of conspiracy theories and the exaggeration of supposed grievance, for of course the only defect of Muslim society that believers permit themselves to admit is unjust powerlessness vis-à-vis the unbelievers.

One taboo subject is

the pivotal role of the suppression of women in reinforcing Muslim stagnation. But if you discourage half of your population from seeking education or a career, as occurs in some Muslim populations, it is hardly surprising in a modern economy that educational and economic levels are, in the aggregate, low.

Muslim journalists repeatedly write in Western newspapers that

Muslim anger must be understood and presumably assuaged or appeased: as if Descartes had written, ‘I’m angry, therefore I’m right.’ But rage is not its own justification, and the rage of young men is frequently misplaced. They project outwards what they feel inwards; and, if they have sufficient intellectual sophistication to do so, they give their petty discontents — and the discontents of the would-be bombers are petty — a vast significance. Education gives them the mental dexterity conceptually to transmute concrete evil into abstract good.

The result is often murderous

when un-self-critical and self-pitying anger meets ideology. The compass of the evil done by the uneducated angry is usually small by comparison with that done by the educated (or at least, the technically trained) angry. The worst the uneducated can manage is a mob and a riot. It takes education, or training, in close alliance with resentment, to put evil more extensively into practice.